This is do-or-die week in Old Blighty. Our British
cousins will decide Thursday whether to
reclaim their birthright, voting to leave the
European Union and the Germans, French and
an assorted gang of easy riders, and reclaim their status
as a world-power capable of sitting on its own bottom.
This would prove the folk wisdom that “where you stand
depends on where you’re sitting.”

The campaign got raucus over the weekend, with
the campaign called “Remain” revealing more than a
hint of desperation, as the public-opinion polls show a
result too close to call. A month ago a result to remain
in the EU was taken as little short of a slam-dunk, but
sentiment shifted and momentum seemed to be with
the hardy folk who want to escape the restraints of a
bureaucracy in Brussels.

“People often complain about voting these days,”
says Boris Johnson, the former two-term mayor of London
who is a leader of the campaign to get Britain out
of Dodge while the getting is good. “They say it doesn’t
make any difference. They say that whatever party they
choose they get
the same old
broken promises.
In fact, they
say there is no
point in bothering
at all.”

Lethargy can be comfortable everywhere; it’s the
curse of the welfare state. Give a man a place to sleep,
enough to eat and comfortable shoes and he’s often
tempted to stay where he is until the big dog growls in
his face. That’s about what the “Remain” campaign has
offered, and ever louder in the final hours leading up to
Thursday’s vote. Britons will wake up Friday morning to
see whether there’s hope at last for change.

Britain is no longer Winston Churchill’s Britain, no
longer inhabited by “a race of kings,” and it’s no longer
even Maggie Thatcher’s Britain, but neither is it yet
Little England with a future only as a province of the
Europe it condescended to for a thousand years.

The Remain campaign, says Boris Johnson, offers only “no change,
no improvement, no reform, nothing but the steady and miserable
erosion of parliamentary democracy in [Britain].
If we vote Remain, we stay locked in the back of the
car, driven by someone with an imperfect command of
English and going in a direction we don’t want to go.”

Several big newspapers, which may or may not
retain the prestige and influence to tilt an election or
referendum in the Internet age when illiterates aspire
to reign over the media, endorsed leaving the EU over
the weekend. The Sun, the down-market but largest
newspaper in the land, said “go.” Then the Daily Telegraph,
the measured voice of the establishment (most
of the time) endorsed leaving. On Sunday morning, the
Sunday Times, Rupert Murdoch’s flagship, followed.

The referendum is pivotal, the Telegraph says, and
in the powerful understatement for which the English
language was invented, decred the level of debate
that has sunk well below the elevated level man had
hoped for. (If the rhetoric in Britain gives the editorialist
a migraine, he must stay out of America.)

But on balance, “the Leave campaign has articulated
an ambitious vision for Britain as an independent nation,
once again free to make its own decisions. The
Remain campaign, by contrast, has resorted to grim
pessimism . . . [diminishing the kingdom] to a diplomatic
pariah, scrabbling to put together trade agreements
while our economy flounders.”

David Cameron’s government, desperate to keep
the misery he knows, threatens, if the vote is to Leave,
to put together an emergency budget that would cut
spending and raise taxes. This, as intended, frightens
the elderly and their pensions, makes dire predictions
about trade agreements, falling prices of well-kept
houses bought over the years, and the crash of the
pound sterling. So far Mr. Cameron has not said anything
about the heartbreak of psoriasis, but there’s still
days to go.

What galls many Britons is the EU’s relentless
ambition to regulate and legislate. Half of all laws and
70 percent of all regulations originate in Brussels, and
there’s more to come. Despite the early scoffing that such
fears were foolish, the EU has sought to become the single
nation it said it never would, with its own currency, a central
bank, no internal boundaries, a supreme court, and a police
and judicial system. Some in Brussels dream even bigger,
with closer “integration” and even a European army.

The Remain campaign has offered only fear of the
unknown as a reason not to leave. “People can sense the true
motives behind Project Fear,” says Boris Johnson. “It isn’t
idealism, or internationalism. It’s a cushy elite of politicians
and lobbyists and bureaucrats, circling the wagons and protecting
their vested interests.” Shades of Bernie Sanders and
Donald Trump. The revolution lives in unexpected places..